The ad industry would have lost $11.78 billion to invalid traffic last year without ad fraud standards in place, according to a report by industry group TAG. The actual losses of $979 million mean a saving of $10.8 billion. More than 90% of ad spend flowed through TAG-certified companies.
West coast startup Infactory enjoyed a $4 million seed funding round for its online fact-checking proposition. Contrary to what you might assume, the company won’t check genAI outputs or use genAI to create its responses. Rather, it will use AI to make trusted data sources more accessible to natural language queries. That’s apparently enough for genAI-hungry investors.
In partnership with attention metrics provider Adelaide, The Trade Desk is now offering high attention inventory to advertisers. Attention — often based on reactions of opt-in panels to ads — is now competing with viewability as a valued attribute, and is being used to complement contextual metrics. Attention has been used in the past to test ads once they have been published; now it’s entering the pre-bid space.
Scope3 is expanding into brand safety and fraud detection turf of Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify. Amazon DSP is the first company to integrate Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform, which eliminates made-for-advertising, fraud, non-brand-safe, and climate-risk inventory by default. A separate Brand Standards product, built on top of the Agentic Media Platform, lets companies connect with expert AI agents to apply additional content standards.